The organizers of the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference (PICC) invite you to submit proposals for papers and talks to be presented at PICC '12.

PICC12 is a gathering of professionals from the diverse IT (computer and network administration) community in New Jersey to learn, share ideas, and network. The conference includes invited speakers and keynotes, training by top-notch experts that is relevant, useful, and recession-friendly; plus an "unconference" track where attendees propose and host their own topics during the event. We expect attendance of 100 to 150 IT professionals from mid to large sized companies and academia from New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania. We go by many titles but everyone is invited: system administrators, network administrators, network engineers, Windows, Linux, Unix, DBAs, etc

Presentation Topics

We strongly welcome topics on best practices, new developments in systems administration, and cutting edge techniques to better manage Linux, Unix, or Windows hosts and environments.

Papers should be of a technical nature and speakers should assume that members of the audience have at least a few years' experience in general IT, Linux/Unix, and/or Windows administration.
The audience will primarily hail from businesses and academic institutions in the New Jersey/New York/Pennsylvania area.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

System Administration

Backup

Security

Troubleshooting

Buying

Decision Making

Virtualization

Cloud computing

Enterprise Monitoring and Management

Identity Management

Web and Email Management

Spam and Virus Filtering

Networking

Wikis

Clustering and High Availability

Log Management

VoIP

Ticketing systems

Bootstrapping and automated installation

Configuration Management and packaging

Topics explicitly NOT requested:

Sales presentations

Vendor product demonstrations

Proposals or vaporware

Here are some topics from our previous two conferences and some ideas for new talks:

Internal Documentation for System Administrators.

The Path to Senior SysAdmin

A senior system administrator describes the 'lessons learned' from converting from one email system to another.

Someone with recent experience in particular technology (cloud computing, backups, Windows 7, etc.) presents "10 things I wish I knew before I started with [name of product]"

A Windows engineer describes how they manage their fleet of of desktops/laptops.

Presentation Format

We are actively seeking proposals for presentations at PICC'12. We have openings for:

Papers: 5-10 page paper, published electronically to attendees at the conference, and publicly after the conference. Presentation at conference will be 30 minutes including Q&A.

Talks: 20 minute presentation + 10 minute Q&A.

Posters: One physical poster of a topic or work in progress, to be discussed with conference goers during a specified poster session

Panels: 45-minute panel discussion

Submit your Presentation

If your presentation is selected you will get a complimentary registration for Saturday May 12. If you want to attend the training on Friday or Saturday you will only pay the difference for the classes.
Submissions and questions should be sent to: [email protected]

Dates and Deadlines

To encourage early submissions, priority (both for inclusion and scheduling) will be given to presentations submitted before the 1st of March.

January 30, 2012 - Deadline for submissions

February 14, 2012 - Final program confirmation

May 11, 2012- Start of conference

Contact and Questions

Please see our website at http://www.picconf.org/ for more information on PICC '12 and presenting at this great event.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email the organizers at: [email protected]